The secrets of Sector Seven
by Carmilla DeWinter
Summary: The Lone Gunmen are on to something here. Tie-in with Interviewer Bias and X-Files crossover, obviously.


I'm no hacker, and I don't really know all that much about the Gunmen. If anything comes across as wrong, please bother to correct me. The same goes for typos, grammar mess-ups and odd sentence structure.

And of course, I don't own the 'bots, the Gunmen or the name Thoron Trommelfeuer/Drumfire, for that matter.

You may blame this on ThetaLambda's questions. It's probably not as good as my other stuff, but it needed to be done.

* * *

The secrets of Sector Seven

Langly grinned as he had a look at this latest clue.

It was a grainy shot, magnified from a cell phone video, and it showed an Army issue jeep. On it's door, "S7" was emblazoned in neat white lettering.

Paying attention to all those amateur conspiracy sites definitely paid off sometimes. They obviously hadn't realized that this "S7" was possibly important.

As expected, a quick search proved that S7 was neither an official part of the US Army, nor had it ever turned up in connection with Area 51 or related topics.

Hmm. Langly took off his glasses for a quick-clean with his Ramones shirt. This was vaguely worrisome, since it proved there was yet another government organization to keep everyone in the dark, and nobody had ever heard of it before, not even Mulder and Scully.

Mulder sure as hell would have told them if he'd found evidence of this, wouldn't he?

Just to be sure, he forwarded the pic to Mulder, who responded after half an hour with a more eloquent version of 'huh?' and told him to have a closer look at it immediately.

So Langly did. He even cancelled his World of Warcraft session that afternoon, much to the dismay of his partner (a dwarf called Thoron Drumfire who was actually a girl from Chicago) to hack into the Pentagon's files - or at least, into the easier accessible ones.

It was hard, it made him miss two other WoW appointments and quite a bit of sleep, but in the end, he did it, and without any help, too.

The end result was rather meager, since it was just an email telling someone in a terse tone that a Cpt. Kevin J. Anderson had been reassigned and his new email address was with s7 . org.

Langly saved the thing for later research on both the sender and the addressee and then went to seek s7.

It took another few days, another few cancelled games and it damaged his pride, since eventually Langly had to approach…

Frohike blinked at him owlishly. "You mean, you, the uber-hacker, can't do it on your own?"

Langly crossed his arms. "I could," he said. "But it would take a lot longer. And I thought it would be nice to have something tangible for the next edition."

"Of course," Frohike offered in an understanding tone, though deep down, Langly was sure, he was laughing his ass off.

So they worked, taking turns sleeping and consuming an unhealthy amount of coffee.

"This is so complicated, I wouldn't be surprised if they were using alien code for that firewall," Frohike said early one morning when the sun was just coming up. "There's got to be something big hidden there."

Eventually, one night around 2 in the morning, Langly typed the last two strands of code and ta-daa, he was in, admiring the uber-futuristic surface.

"Guys!" he called. "We did it."

Frohike had been dozing on the couch and was there in a matter of seconds, while Byers had to wake up, get out of bed, find his slippers, don his Paisley bathrobe and wander over to them, which took a few minutes.

"It really does exist," Byers said and yawned.

"Of course it exists," Frohike grumbled.

"Soo," Langly said, waggling his fingers, "where would you like to go first?"

"You did it, you choose," Frohike said, tone rather amiable.

Langly stretched – it was only right that his efforts were rewarded – and hit the first button: Project Iceman.

It took awhile for the files to load and then… huh? What the…?

He was staring at himself, Frohike and Byers leaning over his chair in the dark loft, looking slackjawed.

There was a soft click, the screen turned black, and some rather messy white handwriting appeared.

_Thank you for this wonderful photo_, it said.

"Do something," Frohike ordered.

Langly set to work, typing frantically, but nothing happened, until eventually the screen turned blank again and something akin to end credits began to appear…

_This prank was brought to you by:_

And a sketch of… well, humanoid robots. Or Power Rangers, maybe. One red one flanked by two yellow ones, to be exact.

* * *

_A few weeks earlier_

Sideswipe was playing Tetris. _Sideswipe_ was playing _Tetris_.

The world was about to end, Bee was sure, so he plopped down next to Sides on the couch.

"Bored?" he asked.

Sides paused the game. "Lacking inspiration," he grumbled.

Ah. That explained a lot. Ironhide had found out about the planned redecorating of his quarters, and since then, Sides had been forced to lay low and be subtle, which didn't come to him easily.

But, there was an idea… "Elita told me something really interesting about Dr. Scully's husband," Bee ventured.

"Yeah?" Sides perked up visibly.

"Yeah. Apparently, he's editing this magazine called 'The Lone Gunman'."

Sides tilted his head while he looked it up on the internet. "Weird," he offered eventually. "They really believe all that slag?"

"Hm-hm," Bee nodded.

"I like the way you think," Sides said. "You want to help me?"


End file.
